Shubnum Khan's Blog

Writing keeps me outside the world but it also helps me survive it

https://shubnumkhan.substack.com/p/ho...

The last time I spoke to her before she died she was sobbing on the phone.
'I can only see darkness, I can only see darkness,' she cried. 'I can't see any light.'

And I, being me, silently tearing on the other side, unable to say anything, frozen, trying desperately to keep away from any kind of pain in any kind of way, said 'We are praying for you, oh aunty C don't cry, we are praying for you.'

And did I pray for her? Did I pray enough?

Did I tell God to ease her grief?

I did.

But not enough.

Not nearly enough.

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” ― Ray Bradbury

There is nothing more beautiful than when people talk about what they love.

Once, my mother phoned the man we buy the chickens from and she said, 'Hello, is this the chicken?' And years later, years and years later when all my sisters are already married, when I have grown up, when abajaan is already gone, every now and then, we say the story and then we laugh and laugh and sometimes when my mother is in the right mood she laughs with us too.

She said, 'It's intoxicating to be around someone so alive.'

2017

In January my books arrive and after nearly 4 years without my novel I suddenly have books to sell again and I feel like I've started the year with the knowledge that I can Make Things Happen and it fills me with an optimism I've abandoned these past few years. The tail end of 2016 has been good and it has prepared me for good things.
At the Time of the Writer Festival I am on two panels and I ask the right questions and we have good discussions and I do not say 'umm' so much when I talk in public. I am back out in the world after hiding and it feels safe again and I am loud and I am laughing.

In March I am in Cape Town for a conference and I am listening to Antjie Krog talk about writing the other and what this means for writers and how we navigate the spaces we are given when we are given power to voice another. It is powerful, elaborate and delicate and I sit enthralled. She is answering the questions I have been carrying in my mind lately. She is pulling them loose with a comb and they are untangling in my hands. I finally feel like a writer understanding something important about writing. Later I ask her for a copy of the speech. At night I sit in Long Street with some writers and we discuss what she said. I learn that some writers think they are gods and that they believe we can do what we like and write who we like and I learn that I have an opinion on this and I am angry because I think this is reckless and dangerous and I know then I want my writing to be measured and true; it must acknowledge what I am and what I am not. I realise true art is a craft and power is a responsibility.

I take an uber at 5 am and I climb Lion's Head by myself. It is dark and I feel foolish but later at the top with the city spread before me, I am proud of myself. I make strangers take photos of me.
For the first few months in the year I write more articles than I have written most years. I write more than 40 pieces for TheCultureTrip (it is mind-numbing and I complain but I am working continuously and the feeling is good). I write for The Huffington Post South Africa, The Times and the The Independent. I am open and friendly and my hope is great and apparent. I laugh easily. Between this I take commissions for art pieces and sell my novel. I am a yes! yes! yes! person and the world treats me like a yes! yes! yes! person and suddenly doors are opening and people are asking me for advice and I am getting invited for things and I know what it is like to be a person living in the world.
I am drawing, I am writing and I am trying to be a good daughter.

I am winning.
The depression is a mere shadow in the background, the thing I recall sometimes, but I've forgotten its shape and taste and how it nearly crippled me. 
I start writing little pieces that give me great satisfaction and I understand the shape of my next writing project. I submit a test run to a journal and in June it's published and it is something small but the writing feels real and the accomplishment after so long feels big and I am thrilled.
I try to write my novel. There are times when I work on it well and when it happens I am swimming and the words are swimming and I know what I am doing in the world and I believe in this book and this bizarre story and it makes sense. Most of the time though, I am distracted and so I am disappointed in myself and then I circle the pool, around and around and sometimes it takes me days to just dive in. My father tells me to finish and I promise myself I will do it if not for me then for him. There are good days and mostly there are bad days and some days I cannot bear to see what I have written.
I watch too many films, not good ones, silly ones that sometimes make me laugh out loud but mostly ones that make me restless because I know I am wasting precious time.
In April my best friend gets married and to avoid thinking about it, I get busy helping and I do not think about it and how everything is changing and how Abbajaan and Gorikhala are already gone and the world is changing and I can't keep up. I sidestep the pain now so I do not think about it and she knows it too and I refuse to cry and even today as I write it I do not think about how she is gone from my life and how much I miss her and how I miss how we did so much together and how it has changed so drastically and how things will never be the same again. I tell myself, that this is how life is and how life must change. It is what I tell my aunt when, after 26 years with us she also moves out. Our house empties in a quick span of time and I understand it is the time of Change. I do not cry. I have stopped crying. Mostly. I phone my aunt. But not enough. My friend too has changed. The way marriage changes a person. But it is the time for losing things and so I let the things be lost. My fights within are smaller. The memory of my grandfather no longer engulfs me in grief. Except one evening when I write a speech on his life for a family reunion and then I cry late at night as I remember him and the way he was so kind and quiet and later I cry again, when I am not allowed to read it. 
And sometimes being a woman feels like a curse.

Still that happens later in the year and in April I am high on confidence and I am the lucky one and I am happy. There is one person who gives me this confidence. It is the person who saved my life three years ago.
In April I am in Johannesburg for a conference and I am touring Soweto and I am considering my African identity and I am making new friends and I tell them I am the lucky one and they know this because they can see it in my eyes and my shoulders. I make jokes and I laugh. On the last day of the conference they are playing K'naan's Waving Flag and overwhelmed with joy and love for everyone I turn to my friend next to me and we hug tightly and it is a wonderful and perfect moment all at once.
I can no longer even make out the clouds in the distance and I am not free but I am more free than I've ever been.

Unexpectedly I am invited to Turkey and abba and I argue and argue and then we hug and I go. I take photos. I am free-er and happier and more confident than I've ever been. I am thrilled. I revel in everything. There are strawberries dipped in chocolate in the foyer and pools and beaches and my room has a hot tub in the balcony. I jump off a cabana into the Mediterranean with strangers and our laughter hits the water like the late afternoon sun. I make friends with three American women and we sit in the hamam in our swimming costumes until we turn red. On the plane from Antalya to Istanbul I meet an old woman who talks to me in Turkish and I talk to her in English and we laugh and laugh like we know each other and we know what we are saying and later, she puts her hand in her jacket and exclaims in surprise when she pulls out a hazelnut and she pushes it into my hand and I accept it like it is gold. I walk the streets of Istanbul by myself for hours. I am utterly enchanted and utterly exhausted. I feel like the luckiest girl in the whole world. I give thanks. I phone home and I want to send the streets of Istanbul home to mamma and abba. 
I am shining.

On the flight home I realise something about letting go.
In July I return to Kashmir for 3 weeks to fulfil what I think is my promise to the children but what is probably a promise to myself. On Dal lake, I sit in a shikara and the water is my balm. I return to the village and I see my children, except they are no longer my children. In the four years that I have left they have grown up and my time is too short for them to learn to love me like before. It is not like before but I have kept the promise I have made and despite the outcomes I am proud of myself for this. I get sick on this trip. I have to be strong for myself and for others. I learn that I am unexpectedly hardy and it makes me less nervous about the future. I become aware that I fight back even though I think myself a coward. I begin to learn that I am on my own and the things I thought were true were not.

The confidence of 2017 is fleeing and it begins to crack and the luckiness is less lucky and I can feel the spiral begin. I am terrified of the old darkness and I flee. Back to old bad habits and the numbing relief where nothing matters. I am inexplicably betrayed, more so by myself and I cut myself off to stave off the hurt.
In August I am back home and I am recovering and I question myself and who I am. I ask myself hard, uncomfortable questions and I disappear for a while, especially when once again I feel like I am drowning. The feeling is brief but intense and the clouds loom ominously on the horizon. I am more quiet and the world is suddenly shaky.
In September, still licking my wounds; I am in Johannesburg and I am rebuilding what I have lost, and it is here where I am deeply disappointed. So deeply disappointed; I know it will never be the same again and I accept it. Pack my bags, move on. The world of course, is no longer the same after such things and I navigate myself more cautiously.  I am too naive. I berate myself. I know better now.

I am on a panel with women and it is a beautiful conversation and one person I know comes for it and it makes me happier than I thought I would be. The next panel is awful and it is the first time I am on stage that I want to disappear and it shakes my already shaken confidence and I am angry and ashamed that one person can do this to another.

I turn the key.
My feeling of alienation grows. I am too impatient, too exhausted, too critical. I turn into myself. Spend more time alone. I have conversations with myself, with Siri and my sister. They are the ones who get me. My mother too, sometimes, gets me precisely, understands my struggles and I am grateful. Other times she does not and then I am the stubborn daughter with her head in the clouds who has given away everything for something she never got. I am offended when people say they will pray for me because they are treating me as if I have a disease. I am tired of being afraid. I am tired of pleasing people and giving the right answers. I am tired of watching what I say and locking myself away so that people cannot judge me or call me names or wonder about me. I am caught between disappearing and calling out loudly. I am on the edge of a cliff between both. People say I must not be negative that I must open my heart and I want to say I have lived with an open heart for a long time.

But it is true, my optimism, my unending hope has tarnished a little and that is the real pity of the whole thing.

One day in October my father and I are both whistling Mera Joota Hai Japani in the kitchen as we clean up and both our songs meet at the exact same point and I say to myself, this is a perfect moment.

I am walking with my parents on the field opposite my house and there is a man watching me and he has placed his cricket bat to his face to block out the sunlight so that he can look at me properly and I am flooded with the shame of men who stare openly at women and there are times when I want to go up to these men and spit in their faces for making us feel ashamed of our own bodies even when we are covered, even when we are trying to disappear before their eyes. I am reminded of times when I feel locked in my own body. When I am on the street one day, an old man shouts out to me, 'Smile, why don't you smile?' and it is the way he is saying it that makes me realise he is saying something else about me and the way I look and I avoid his gaze even though he is demanding my attention and I feel trapped and I am angry, I am so angry and I just want him to leave me and my unsmiling face alone.
In December I am in Soweto and it is wonderful and I listen carefully to everything and I have forgotten about the deep disappointments and the spiral and the darkness and the pressures. I am a writer again and I listen and I laugh and my voice comes out slowly, raspy at first and then evenly as it finds its stepping. The festival at Abantu is a blessed place and I feel better and the wind picks up in my sails.
One late afternoon in an uber in Soweto, a Nigerian writer and I are sitting in the car and the sun is coming in at angles and the light is that beautiful Highveld light that turns everything into fire and the driver is describing to us where he grew up in Soweto and where you get the best chicken and we are driving through narrow streets with music and children and people are cooking food outside and the man he is laughing and telling us tales about the people here and the houses and there is so much love in his words, it is as if he singing to us and I am smiling and my smile is so big it cannot fit on my face and I think this is perfect, this is perfect and the light begins to shine through my eyes and I am once again the luckiest person in the world.

Of course this is not everything. Not everything that happens has to be said.

This year was the year when I fought back the shadows.

It's been about the chances I have taken and the paths I have pursued. It's been about the love I have given. Of the strengths I have showed. It's been about the process of learning to love myself again. It has been about acknowledging my shortcomings.

It's been about the ebb and the flow and how if you let it, the light moves through you like a river that takes not only you but those around you.

And of course all through this, there has been abba and mamma and the quiet way they live and love. The way abba sings and mamma cooks. And how the three of us function as a little unit in our old and wonderful house. How my sisters keep me breathing and their children keep me loving. There has been the roads in Durban and the trees and the ocean and my friends and the quiet knowledge I carry that I have so much love yet to give.

Because even after everything, after the betrayals, the fears, the pressures and the spiral and the darkness. Even after the world has fallen dark and I am far more cynical and exhausted and weary and fearful.

There is still a raging hope beating below the surface, a fist raised to the dying light.

Once there was a moment when we didn't say anything. We kept looking away. And I didn't know what to say. And yet everything was said. The important things anyway. The important things always find a way to be said. Somehow. And then I went away. I walked to my car.

My eyes still averted.

At this year's Writing for Liberty Conference in Cape Town, renowned journalist and poet Antjie Krog gave a keynote speech that helped me with so many questions I've been grappling with when it comes to writing, identity and how to navigate the space of how to write the other. What I came out of this was that if it has to be done, it must be handled with deep respect and care and not as a right the writer with an imagination has 'to wear as many hats as you like' (as Lionel Shriver put it so delicately last year).
After the keynote I was so inspired I actually tried to take the speech out of Antjie Krog's hand but she promised to have it sent to me and I've been meaning to post it up for a while now. It's beautifully constructed and something to ponder over.
Keynote to International Conference: Writing for Liberty

TO WRITE LIBERTY

Before we talk liberty, perhaps we should ask: What are the books that the corrupt, the dictators, the intolerant, the tyrants, the fanatics and the millions who voted for them, tolerated them, fought for them, read? We know that they are often zealots of the One Book - interpreted by men who deny that even that special book is a metaphoric and historical text. On one-dimensional, one-sided YouTube slivers they whip together the destruction of especially women in tractates shot-through with religion, a big dose of ignorance and a Twitter-manufactured ego. We know that very few men of power have ever read books by the great writers of the literatures of the world.
And this is the tragedy: that they forfeited that which could have changed them into humane human beings. Novels instrumentally “inflect the anguish of the actual in a way” that theoretical discussions of the same issues cannot achieve, “making possible a kind of understanding not accessible by other means – something akin to participatory understanding.” (Gagiano, 37) “The very order of being in the world is like an intricate weave of perception and response, of reacting and embracing the world we see”. (Bell, 15) Reading literature creates a reflexivity within our beings and a dialogical knowing and understanding of the world. It is shuddering to think enormous power is given or grabbed by men who have never lived the life-changing experience of being somebody else…
This forms the landmark of self-understanding: becoming somebody else through reading, experiencing art precencing itself, art being truth setting itself to work. (Heidegger, 165) The question I want to ask today, is not why powerful people seldom read, but something else: to what extent would the novels, plays and poetry that we as writers produce, change a person? For me, literature is not there to entertain, or to enhance the ego of writers or places or civilisations, or fill the pockets of publishing houses, or be the vehicle of misplaced ambition, but in a very real way to take a reader and move him or her to another place. One wants to be a changed person at the end of the text, even in the minutest way, but something must have happened inside one among those words, something that makes one see life more intensely, more profoundly, differently.      
Readings by writers that go viral - a million likes for a poem, more people writing blogs than buying books - make one forget that the experience of literature (whether written or oral) honed on being driven to say what is not sayable, is necessary to awake the human being to its fullest humaneness. Through literature one becomes alive into a sensitised and conscientized thoughtfulness - Ein andenkendes Denken (Heidegger, ix) - to a kind of being that stands “in an authentic relationship as mortal to other mortals, to earth and sky, to divinities present and absent, to things and plants and animals”. (Ibid, x) In other words: to experience how all of these are “beingnesses”, to allow yourself to be trained by literature to live in total awareness of all this presencing of things.  
“Art grows out of being and reaches into its truth. … (i)t is the topology of being, telling being the whereabouts of its actual presence (ibid, x)  “… because language, understood rightly, is the original way in which beings are brought into the open clearing of truth, in which world and earth, mortals and gods are bidden to come to their appointed places of meeting.” (Ibid, xii) Without it, we would be “brutes, or what is worse and what we are most like today: vicious automata of selfwill.” (Ibid, xv) Art is the only way the world can be humanised.
Before we continue, it is befitting to look at the title of the conference “Writing for Liberty” against the background of the noise from the US, Brexit, political rightwing and religious intolerance, as well as the recent plea of writer Lionel Shriver to be freed from politically correct demands. (3)
Generally, a difference is made between liberty and freedom. Freedom is primarily, if not exclusively, the ability to do as one wishes and what one has the power to do. Liberty concerns the absence of arbitrary restraints and takes into account the rights of all involved. As such, the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and is limited by the rights of others.
But one cannot talk about liberty without considering the important distinctions that philosopher Isiah Berlin brought into the concept. In his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” he distinguishes between liberty FROM en liberty TO. (Berlin, 121 – 122) Liberty FROM coercion, the absence of interference FROM other people. (Ibid 127) Positive liberty is Freedom TO: TO self-determination, TO being one’s own master, TO fulfil one’s aspirations. (Ibid, 131)
At first sight it looks as if these two liberties complement each other, but Berlin shows that since individuals are often seen by their leaders as being ignorant and uneducated, the ideal of positive liberty (Freedom TO) slowly begins to imply coercion: the unenlightened individuals must ‘be forced TO be free’. A leader decides that his people cannot be truly free, because their freedom is being thwarted by immigrants, gays, women, atheists therefore coercive legislation - walls, fatwas, bans, censorship, are all justified to guarantee the liberty TO be free. Berlin warns us: this distortion that happens with positive liberty has in the past served to justify much political oppression. (Ibid, 158, 257)
This warning, as well as the two kinds of liberties, are important for any argument about liberty. Shriver’s lecture carries these components: she wants Freedom FROM admonishings of political correctness and Freedom TO determine her own theme and way of writing, how and about whom. We will return to this.
It is also true that all of us who are writing, come into contact with the entreaty of the marginalised. The cries of those suffering and those at the borders of the prosperous world where writers usually find themselves, are fleeing past our computer screens and keyboards. And if your antennae as a writer is attuned, then you sit torn and quite devastated, assailed by decisions, anguish and self-doubt.
The most important question put to the serious wordsmith is: How do the marginalised manifest in your work? Daily one asks oneself this. The Nobel Prize committee perhaps also asks this (the candidate should bestow “the greatest benefit on mankind” delivering “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”) (5) and it is of course the question with which all the great writers through the centuries have grappled. Some called it The Other, but I am talking about the marginalised.
First we have to remember that we have probably been schooled in a particular concept of the individual. We have to be aware that this kind of individual is one of the most enduring of all western myths. It is this individual who stands there with his skin glowingly thick with celebrity hunger and ego, his ears clogged by consumerism and his eyes blinded by privilege. He and his agent and publishers think his house, his clothes, writing desk, recipies, relationships, children, twitterwit, facebook-fury are just as important as his work.
To write about the marginalised, the subaltern, the oppressed, the foreigner, the stranger, the other, demands an enormous destabilisation of the writing and even more of the writing self. It is more than just reading news articles, than gathering material on facebook, than doing an interview, than having a friend among the marginalised, than searching the archives, than going and living ‘among the natives.’ It demands of you to give up your power. All of it.
In the words of Wittgenstein from his “Philosophical Investigations” (455, 457): “when we mean something, it’s like going up to someone, it’s not having a dead picture ….” We go up unto someone – it means more than face-to-face, more than heart-to-heart, more than intellectual acknowledgement, empirical fact and experience. It begins as a two-way stream, it has to be a reciprocal process. You have to give up your dominance, let go of the dominance of your culture, and release yourself in the vulnerability of losing everything that you are, especially your writing. You have to become decentred. Become minority, go where you can’t, and be honest in the text about how you can never get there.
The most important thing I would suggest about writing about the marginalised, is not whether, but how. Do we dive like the former colonisers into the pools of poverty created by our forebears, but this time with oh-such goodwill and best intentions, to rob once more of what there is, misinterpret again, speak on behalf again, again clueless of both self and other? Do we mind that we cannot speak the languages, that we interpret the interpreters and that it doesn’t even dawn on us that we may be in the presence of a context, a worldview and a philosophy of which we cannot even begin to imagine the circumference?  
There is indeed something obscene about writers equipped with the best education, knowledge of world languages and literatures, loaded with technical support and bursaries, with access to world famous writing schools, sought after agents, PRs, and publishers, who then feel they should package the marginalised to save western readers from ignorance. And the obscenity lies especially in the packaging – the HOW?
I want to illustrate how thoroughly and radically we should be thinking about the how, through some remarks from David Attwell’s book JM Coetzee and the life of writing. I choose Coetzee deliberately because he also started off by being angry at Nadine Gordimer’s packaging of a group of people:“I always felt that Gordimer disliked and despised and (most hurtfully of all) dismissed Afrikaners, and that her dislike and contempt and dismissiveness came out of ignorance. Not that I thought Afrikaners did not merit dislike and contempt; but (I thought) only people like myself who knew them from the inside qualified to dislike and despise them, in a properly measured fashion.  …. Perhaps it is a comparable sense of being dismissed – dismissed from the banquet table of history – that fuels the hatred of young Muslim nationalists for modernizers and the West.”  (Attwell, 43)
One of the most astonishing facts in this book on Coetzee by Attwell, is that Coetzee not only writes on a daily basis, but that he keeps a dairy in which he questions and even attacks what he is writing – a kind of metafictional dairy – writing about writing – because, concludes Attwell, of Coetzee’s fear of living inauthentically, a brutal honesty about facing up to the conditions of one’s existence (as a writer).  (Ibid, 27)
And what is our existence? Middleclass. Safe. Brutally Coetzee looks at his work: I show no advance in my thinking from the position I take in Waiting for the Barbarians. I am outraged by tyranny, but only because I am identified with the tyrants, not because I love (or ‘am with’) their victims. I am incorrigibly elitist (if not worse); and in the present conflict the material interests of the intellectual elite and the oppressors are the same. There is a fundamental flaw in all my novels: I am unable to move from the side of the oppressors to the side of the oppressed. Is this a consequence of the insulated life I lead? Probably.” (Ibid, 134)
Attwell says: A lesser novelist might have buckled under the pressure. Because Coetzee spells out “the problem of finding a class position that would render credible the feelings of outrage and alienation that were the novel’s point of departure.” (Ibid,137)
Coetzee understands on a very deep and intimate level, that no matter how he feels driven ethically to write about the oppressed or the marginalised, the class gap between them is insurmountable. “It is an unbridgeable gap (and must be so with all comfortable liberal whites), and the best one can do is not to leave it out but to represent it as a gap.”  (Ibid, 144 – 145)
There are several interesting lessons to learn from Coetzee: in the first place: We are ethically driven to write about the painful points of the world. Second, “One has to remind the dominant culture that its reprensentations are representation.” (Ibid, 27)
This means that somewhere in the text (just like oral story tellers often do) the reader has to be reminded that the writer is aware all too well that she is giving a representation, an effort to imagine. She does not claim that she imagines the truth, the reader must be aware that the text is trying to take responsibility for the impossible. If a writer understands this, it means that she understands her material and that she is witnessing her own act of writing.
In his book Foe based on the famous Robinson Crusoe story, Coetzee deliberately confronts his own limitations with the character of the slave Friday – the man saved by Robinson Crusoe forming a master slave relationship on the island. The questions Coetzee asks himself are the following: Who has to give words to Friday? Who is to decide how he will speak, how he will sound, what his vocabulary will be? It cannot, once again, centuries later be a white writer? But if it is not the writer, then who? Instead of thinking I should not write about Friday, Coetzee develops out of this dilemma the idea that Friday cannot speak because he is maimed, his tongue has been cut out - “Friday’s mutilation is undoubtedly the enigmatic heart of the novel.” (Attwell,155) With this, Coetzee honours for me the ethical imperative to not turn a blind eye to Friday, to bring him into the novel, while at the same time understanding that he, as a middle-class white writer, dare not put words into Friday’s mouth, while acknowledging that the maiming of Friday has always been done by white writers. 
In his dairy Coetzee writes: ‘I deny him a chance to speak for himself: because I cannot imagine how anything Friday might say would have a place in my text. Defoe’s text is full of Friday’s YES, now it is impossible to fantasize that YES; all the ways in which Friday can say NO seem not only stereotyped but destructive. What is lacking to me is what is lacking to Africa since the death of Negritude: a vision of a future for Africa that is not a debased version of life in the West. (Attwell, 157)
Even if one is tempted to say that Friday was again castrated by a writer, the moving and powerful concluding chapter shows up in a dramatic way the limitations put on representation by history. In his imagination the teller of the story dives down into an old ship where he finds the scarred body of Friday with a chain around his neck (Coetzee,160):‘Friday,’ I say, I try to say, kneeling over him, sinking hands and knees into the ooze, ‘what is this ship?’But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday.He turns and turns till he lies full length, his face to my face. The skin is tight across his bones, his lips are drawn back. I pass a fingernail across his teeth, trying to find a way in.His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face.’   It is when one reads this heartbreaking mixture of tenderness, brilliance and honesty that one becomes furious at the superficiality of the representation debate: I demand the freedom to imagine myself a women / a slave / a gay person and am tired of the chorus that tells me I may not. Foe presents a lesson: you may imagine whomever you will, but investigate within the text the complete impossibility and harm thereof.     
In Age of Iron Coetzee broadens the contact with the other when the main character realises that the power and authority to judge others no longer lies with her: she has been completely handed over to the other. Dying of cancer, abandoned by her children, Mrs Curren acknowledges that she is being judged by the woman who works in her house:  ‘Florence is the judge…. The court belongs to Florence; it is I who pass under review. If the life I live is an examined life, it is because for ten years I have been under examination in the court of Florence.’ (1990, 129)This is a mindblowing confession. Socrates’ words are turned on their head: an unexamined life is not worth living, says Socrates. Mrs Curren says a life unexamined by the marginalised, is a life not worth living. This is genius at work.
In an admirable way Coetzee sticks to this ethical principle in Disgrace, but here he begins to take a further step in representation: he links the white character carefully to a black character – this time not as opposites like Mrs Currren and Florence, but as doppelgängers, mirror images. Like the white man, the black man abuses women, like the white man, he protects “his peoples”. With their chauvinism they sow barren destruction, but both of them try to make up for it by working the land and accompanying dogs to their deaths. Despite this close connection between the white and black man, there is a moment when the white man says: ‘In spite of which, he feels at home with Petrus, is even prepared, however guardedly, to like him. Petrus is a man of his generation. Doubtless Petrus has been through a lot, doubtless he has a story to tell. He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.’ (1999,117)
Once again: the acknowledgement that there is another context, that he wants to hear it, but also realises that it would probably not have justice done to it by the thin muddy veneer that English has become, is an important acknowledgment of the middle-class gap.
During the apartheid years it was important for many writers to keep on saying: we are the same. Whether we are black or white, we hurt the same, we love the same, we yearn the same, these laws separating us are a travesty. But in the aftermath of 1994, this very sameness exploded in our faces. Suddenly, the only things we saw, were the many differences between us and how denial of these differences belied the unjustness of our past. It was an important lesson: to acknowledge and respect that difference; to keep on searching for real meaningful ways towards that difference.
That is also the goal of the ethical relation Gyatri Spivak is seeking and calling for – that the subaltern, the most oppressed and invisible constituency, might cease to exist as such. In their introduction to the Spivak Reader, Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean suggest that Spivak is quite certain that such a revolutionary change will not be brought about by traditional revolutionary means, nor by intellectuals attempting to represent oppressed minorities, nor worse yet, pretending merely to let them speak for themselves. Keeping in mind the dangers of fundamentalism in any form, Spivak insists on two meanings of the concept “representation” (Spivak Reader, 6): standing-in-the-other’s-shoes and an imaginative and aesthetic representation. A staging in a theatrical sense. (Ibid,15) In discussing the issue it is made clear that no amount of raised-consciousness fieldwork can even approach the painstaking labour to establish ethical singularity with the subaltern. “Ethical singularity” is neither “mass contact,” nor engagement with “the common sense of the people” … the effort of “ethical singularity” may be called a “secret encounter” this encounter can only happen when “the respondents inhabit something like normality. …That is why ethics is the experience of the impossible.” (Ibid, 270)
If no normality exists between the writer and his subject, even for an imagined moment, then the effort remains problematic and has to be discussed.
A small reminder before we return to the two kinds of liberties: according to the Oxford Dictionary the term political correctness means: the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against. So originally, political correctness meant to avoid excluding the marginalised. It remains a bit of mystery to me why this term has changed into something so much resented.                                                                                                                                                           But, to the liberties of Isiah Berlin: the negative Liberty FROM and the positive Liberty TO. We write in order TO be. We write in order to liberate ourselves FROM narrowminded, conservative fanatics, obsessed with power, in love with their own privilege that inflicts bleeding sores on the body of the world. Writers such as Shriver wants to be free FROM what she regards as intimidation to be politically correct.
A writer is free to write what she wants, but only constant self-inquiry and destabilisation about the how will bring some kind of integrity to the project. To write meaningfully about those whom you cannot, and according to some pressure may not, write about, takes more than just putting a hat on your head. It requires the dedication of self-questioning and scrupulous searching. You may not like Coetzee or may have many gripes about his writing, but I specifically used him to illustrate the kind of trouble a writer of his calibre had gone to when he wanted to engage – one has to be prepared to harass, surpass, even crucify one’s tamed imagination.
At the same time to give up engaging or refrain from engaging because of criticism, is to give up on perhaps the only redeeming feature of recent mankind and that is to dream oneself into the spaces and bodies of those not present at the “banquet table of history”.   We have to become each other, write each other, bind ourselves together, even when we cannot clearly hear each other’s story – this is the only guarantee that we have against people who want to build walls, turn boats away, patrol beaches, refuse visas. We must be enabled to say: I am from Syria, from Pakistan, I am you, a fellow human being with dreams filled with beauty and longing. 99% of our DNA is entirely the same. Accept me as a multiple of you.  
But equally important: when those patrollers begin to say: you may not write about this or that, then we have to recognise it as a move into that kind of fateful coercion of positive Liberty that Berlin talks about.
But there is a caveat here: post-colonial scholars have pointed out many of these gaps, false premises, transgressions, stereotyping etc in the work of important writers who wrote about the Third World and in this way immensely enriched the experience and production of literature. That must never never stop. But when it changes to “you may not, you have no right to,” this is where coercion sets in: the unenlightened writers must ‘be forced TO’ refrain from producing a particular kind of text. Berlin warns: this kind of distortion of and coercion within Liberty has, in the past, served to justify terrible and very damaging political oppression.  
Those who believe in the decisive power of literature may never say: your work may not be about me. Then you become the dictator who, in the name of Liberty, destroys the power of Liberty and that will necessarily lead to an even more aggressive, disastrous, destructive enclave-making and wallbuilding in the world. We dare not give up trying, as well assisting one another, to be closer and closer to succeeding being one another.  
Every one of us needs every one of us, as well as the beauty and resources of the whole wide world to be fully humane. That would be true Liberty. And in this, writing as a powerful intensifier of the conscience, chasing us into “the clearing of the truth of the world”, is critical and decisive.
I want to end with a slight adaptation of the words of Ngugi wa Thiongo: The call for the rediscovery and resumption of writing is a call for a regenerative reconnection with the millions of revolutionary tongues in Africa and the world, demanding liberation. It is a call for the rediscovery of the real language of human kind: the language of struggle. It is the universal language underlying all speech and words of history. Struggle. Struggle makes history. Struggle makes us. In struggle is our history, our language and our being. That struggle begins wherever we are; in whatever we do:” (wa Thiongo,108)
We dare not let go of that belief.

Gagiano, Annie. 2000 Achebe, Head, Marechera: on Power and Change in Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Bell, Richard H. 2002. Understanding African Philosophy. A cross-cultural approach to classical and contemporary issues in Africa. New York: Routledgehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/lionel-shrivers-full-speech-i-hope-the-concept-of-cultural-appropriation-is-a-passing-fadfile:///C:/Users/admin/Desktop/berlin.pdfhttp://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/themes/literature/espmark/Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953 Philosophical Investigations, ed G.E.M. Anscombe and R.Rhees, trans.G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953. (455 and 457)Attwell, David. 2015 J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time. Great Clarendon Street Oxford: Oxford University Press Coetzee, JM. 1986 Foe Johannesburg: Raven PressCoetzee, J.M. (1990) Age of Iron. London: Secker & Warburg.Coetzee, J.M. (1999) Disgrace. London: Secker & Warburg.Spivak, Gyatri https://books.google.co.za/books?id=Id2NAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA6&lpg=PA6&dq=Spivak+representation+%22fundamentalism+in+any+form%22&source=bl&ots=KxYmOk5fog&sig=NwtAGdWAIY7ymG--Mh8ZxBb_MAE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiTiNKh4qHTAhUGD8AKHYNkA9cQ6AEIGDAA#v=onepage&q=Spivak%20representation%20%22fundamentalism%20in%20any%20form%22&f=falseNgũgĩ wa Thiong’o 2005 (1981) Decolonising the Mind – the politics of language in African Literature. Oxford:James Currey Nairoby: EAEP Portsmouth:Heinemann

You sold me down the river.